Rara, your friends must have gotten into a bad batch of Jettas.
I have two cars in my garage, a '98 Jetta GLX and a '96 Contour SE. My (Mexican built) Jetta has been one of the most reliable cars I've ever owned. Maybe I'm just lucky?
My wife's '96 SE has been pretty reliable, but it is definitely inferior with respect to longevity of a lot of those little PITA things that suggests a lack of engineering and manufacturing attention to detail. Things like why did the plastic clips holding the bottom of the back seat fail? Would it have taken that much to bolt the damn seat in place? How about that stupid fuel filler door? Why does the blower fan rattle on the lowest speed, but not any of the others? There's more, but I won't go on.
I've owned three other Fords ('89 Mustang LX 5.0, '92 Taurus GL and '96 Probe GT) and the same can be said of all of them. Basically they're fine for the first two years then all of that little PITA crap starts to fall apart. Only the 'stang had major failures that stranded me in addition to those little irritations.
